Banana Split 
 
Category: Game Song
Source: Azizi Powell Collection {Pittsburgh, PA 1999; Auburn Terrace after-school group}, Pittsburgh, PA. 1999

Directions :  Children stand in circle and begin to chant in unison.  After the last line of the unison chant (i.e.“2, "4", 6”), one child quickly says “1”, and the child standing next to him or her in clockwise position says “2”, and so on, making sure not to say the number “5” or any number with “5” in it.  Any child who says “5” or any number with “5” in it (such as “15” or “25”) is out of the game.  Children who take too long to say the correct number are also out of the game.  The object of the game is to be alert enough to say the next consecutive number, making sure to skip saying “5” or a number with “5” in it.  The last child in the game is the winner. 

Banana Split
            makes me sick.
            Oogle aggle oogle aggle
            2, 4, 6.
            If you say “5”
           You’re out of the game.
           Oogle aggle oogle aggle
            2, 4, 6. 

This chant, like a considerable number of the rhymes and chants featured in CocoJams, was collected in 1999 as a result of presentations my associates and I conducted for a group of children who reside in housing developments within Pittsburgh neighborhoods.  As part of our cultural presentation on traditional, adapted and original African American game songs, and chants, we asked the children to sing and perform any song, handclapping rhyme and chant that they knew.  The children liked the fact that I audio taped these songs, rhymes and chants and then played it back to them. 

When this game was first introduced to me, the girls and boys continued up to the number “36”, and I stopped them & thanked them.  If you play this fun game, you may also want to decide on an “end number” as the children could continue counting for ever. 

After I heard this game, I asked groups of children I worked with if they knew it.  I never found any who did, not even those who lived in a different but nearby section of the city.   

 The first part of “Banana Split” is similar to the Black children’s rhyme “Apple On A Stick" (“Apple on a stick, makes me sick; makes my tummy go two forty-six”).  See Barbara Michels, & Bettye White, Apples On A Stick, The Folklore of Black Children, New York, Coward-McCann, Inc. 1983, p.11).